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This is released!! Have a lot to say about this but it'll have to wait as the time is approaching 3am and I need to go to bed. I'm glad to finally release it though. Hope you enjoy it.

For this Wizard Jam, I'm doing something a bit different. As a kind of experiment I wanted to go back to the first solo game I ever made (well.. attempted, I didn't even get close to finishing it), and see if I could remake it in two weeks. I thought it'd be a neat way of measuring the personal progress I've made in the intervening years; and also, it would just be nice to get the game out there and playable after so much time inside my head and in long-abandoned Unity project files. When I think back on the early days of my game development career (then hobby), I think of this game and the various hurdles I had to overcome to get even the most basic stuff things running on-screen. Maybe getting this game done and finally putting it to bed will be cathartic.

So this is Concentric. Back in 2014 I picked up a copy of Unity 4.3 with Playmaker and set out to make a tiny score-attack style game. The gameplay was something like a deconstructed Frogger. You control a small circle that can move along the ring you're occupying, or hop between rings. The objective is to collect pickups that spawn in the outer ring, and carry them back to the center of the screen. You had to do this whilst avoiding obstacles. The faster you were able to deliver the pickup back to the center, the more points you earned. Over time the game gets harder and harder until you die. I messed around with this in evenings and weekends for several months making not that much progress, in the way that you do when you're using a project to learn as a primary focus. I abandoned it in the summer of 2014, when Unreal Engine 4 became available and I jumped ship after learning about Blueprints. Below is the only footage I have of the old version. It was so far from being functional, let alone complete: there was no way to take damage or end the game, or progress through the level structure.

I often wonder about how it would have played if it was more functional. I ask myself: would it even be fun? Would the controls get confusing when played in real-world circumstances? I hope to find out in the next fortnight. You guys can hang out on this thread and find out with me if you like.

(Above: The only footage I have from the 2014 version of Concentric)

For Wizard Jam, I'll probably end up making some minor design changes to the game; most notably I'm thinking of structuring the game around set pre-authored levels as opposed to an endless level that gets more difficult over time. I figure that it's an easier structure to get something playable and working early, which is going to be important given the short timeframe.

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How are you planning to vary the premade levels? More enemies than just those spiky snake ones, changing up the map?

Yeah, both of those things. Gonna spend a day or so thinking about the most flexible way to implement enemies so that I don't come into contact with some of the same problems I had last time around.

Last night I started by spending some time putting together a kit for configuring level layouts. Just getting this and player movement done in a day feels pretty good, knowing how much of an ordeal it was in 2014. This is turning out to be a weirdly enjoyable exercise so far.

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It's been a slow few days but I've been working on this in any spare moments I have. Most recently, I got through a bunch of game structure stuff that means I was able to set up menus like pause and level select screens. One thing I wanted from the outset was a seamless transition from menu to gameplay. It took me a while to figure out how I was going to present it; I ended up making a mockup in Photoshop which I brought back into the editor and sort of "traced over".

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I did some more mockups tonight. Planning out the UI screens on paper (figuratively speaking) before making them is pretty good since it gives me time to think about not just how they should look, but also the best way to implement them.

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I should say I love the slight 3D shading you have on the game elements, it's a really nice effect.

Thanks! I kind of happened upon the effect by accident when I was experimenting with ways to replicate the look of the old game in 3D. Because of that, I have no real idea as to how I would go about replicating it if I wanted to! Wah!!

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This looks really slick. I could see how the controls could be confusing if you're using digital inputs, like if 'left' means left from your perspective or from the dot's perspective .But it seems like it would work well with analog or touch controls. I guess it's hard to tell unless you're actually playing it, though. I'm looking forward to trying it at the end of the jam.

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Played it today and have to say this is very cool, from A to Z (well, I didn't play through all of it, because time and lack of skill...). The whole presentation/design is perfectly executed (especially the sound!). I am very bad at this game, but at the same time I never get mad at the game, because I always know, that I did a bad move. It is never unfair, which is good!

One minor concern about the controls: I get why it's like it is (moving counter/-clockwise when pressing in a direction), but sometimes, it felt weird to move the stick left and the dot went right. But I don't have any idea how to make it different/better. It's probably also just something to get used to

Well done!

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Presentation and the interface design* was top notch as usual with your games!

The gameplay is quite challenging but super fun (again, as usual). I also found it a bit difficult to adjust to moving the stick in opposite direction to where I wanted to go when I was in the lower part of the play area, especially if I had not moved for a while. Did you experiment with having gamepad controls where in order to complete a full rotation, you have to rotate the left stick 360 degrees? Obviously not the best solution for keyboard, but might feel more natural when played with a controller.

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Just finished this. It was a little awkward using keyboard controls, but manageable. In practice it turned out to be more reaction-based than I would have thought from the gifs. Less "plan out a path to the goal and back" and more "find the next gap".

Something I noticed in the later levels is that if you die to an ordinary obstacle just as the obstacle that follows the player's path spawns, you'll might die again when you respawn (because you spawn on top of the 'follow' obstacle). Not sure if that's intended, but it doesn't matter much. The new types of obstacles enemies were introduced intuitively. I liked that there was a 'practice' level for each of them before they were mixed up with other obstacles in later levels.

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Wow. Another fantastic game, Zero. I was hooked from the first second, but the addition of the phantom was truly an inspired choice. Absolutely fantastic. Made a point to go through and try to beat all your high scores

I love the way everything is communicated visually. After a single run, it is always entirely clear how the new obstacles work. It looks so simple, but it's clear that it was well thought out. There seems to be a slight lag between getting onto a line and being able to jump off of it; I assume this was intentional? At first it was a bit frustrating, but I quickly got used to it. Compared to the rest of the game, that one interaction feels just *slightly* less polished, possibly because there is no obvious indicator of when you will be able to jump. (This might not be necessary though, considering this "lag" is probably measurable only in microseconds.) Obviously, I still enjoyed the heck out of it though.

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Oh! Another thing I noticed is that you seem to earn stars for repeating levels. I feel like this messes with the progression of the game. Couldn't you unlock everything just by replaying the first level over and over? You should max out at 78 stars, but I have 134 lol. I imagine this is a bug.

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There seems to be a slight lag between getting onto a line and being able to jump off of it; I assume this was intentional? At first it was a bit frustrating, but I quickly got used to it. Compared to the rest of the game, that one interaction feels just *slightly* less polished, possibly because there is no obvious indicator of when you will be able to jump. (This might not be necessary though, considering this "lag" is probably measurable only in microseconds.)

I found this to be frustrating when I played as well. I kept dying because I couldn't pop to one line and then quickly just pop back. Was this intentional?

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Input note: XBox 360 menu controls on windows are a little frustrating. Specifically, I find the [Start] > [Left Analog Down] > [A] combo more often than not snaps back to "Resume" instead of the intended "Restart". Not sure if it's a deadzone issue or something, perhaps the slight springy "waggle" back up after flicking down on the analog stick. But it's very repeatable.

But did I mention this game is really fun? Because good job it's great